If we're seeing a trend over the past few months, it's that 'serverless' as a term is being extended and redefined to fit into a variety of situations that weren't on the radar a few years ago. This week's issue seems to demonstrate that particularly well as we look at a variety of different platforms and workloads such as data processing, proxying, monitoring, and sending email.— Peter Cooper, editor

▶ Serverless Tales from the Trenches — A 27 minute talk (followed by Q&A) from the recent GOTO Chicago 2018 event that digs into the architecture of one company’s JavaScript-based SPA and how it’s hosted on Amazon’s services in a serverless manner. A worthwhile primer if you want to get a feel for the operational ‘structure’ of a production serverless app.

Peter Sbarski

Using Cloudflare Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic — Cloudflare’s Workers is interesting because it places a serverless JavaScript environment in front of otherwise ordinary sites meaning you can perform various tasks before requests hit your server, as seen here.

▶ Let's Play with Zeit's Serverless Docker Feature — It goes all over the place, but it’s just fun to watch Mattias play with Zeit Now’s newest feature for rapidly deploying code. I’ve been playing too and found it’s particularly well suited to deploying languages without native support on the major platforms (e.g. Ruby).

Sending Emails from AWS Lambda Inside a VPC Without NAT — You might have your AWS Lambda functions running in a VPC to access RDS or other services, but not want to create an expensive NAT gateway to send mails. Solution? Use S3 as a gateway to another function outside of the VPC.